Valley of the shadow of death - Crimea War - Roger

"Indeed, war photography begins with such a mission, such a disgrace. The war was the Crimean War, and the photographer, Roger Fenton, invariably called the first war photographer, was no less than that war's "official" photographer, having been sent to the Crimea in early 1855 by the British government at the instigation of Prince Albert. Acknowledging the need to counteract the alarming printed accounts of the unanticipated risks and privations endured by the British soldiers dispatched there the previous year, the government had invited a well-known professional photographer to give another, more positive impression of the increasingly unpopular war."
"With each image requiring a separate chemical preparation in the darkroom and with exposure time as long as fifteen seconds, Fenton could photograph British officers in open-air confabulation or common soldiers tending the cannons only after asking them to stand or sit together, follow his directions, and hold still. His pictures are tableaux of military life behind the front lines; the war—movement, disorder, drama—stays off-camera. The one photograph Fenton took in the Crimea that reaches beyond benign documentation is "The Valley of the Shadow of Death," whose title evokes the consolation offered by the biblical psalmist as well as the disaster of the previous October in which six hundred British soldiers were ambushed on the plain above Balaklava— Tennyson called the site "the valley of Death" in his memorial poem "The Charge of the Light Brigade." Fenton's memorial photograph is a portrait of absence, of death without the dead. It is the only photograph he took that would not haveneeded to be staged, for all it shows is a wide rutted road studded with rocks and cannonballs that curves onward across a barren rolling plain to the distant void."